Jerry Lee Lewis (© Photofest)
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It was getting awfully close to 9:00 p.m. on Sunday night, July 28, 1957, when The Steve Allen Show was scheduled to end. Viewers had already endured two sappy songs: Jodie Sands’s “With All My Heart” and the Four Coins’ “Shangri-La.” Actors Shelley Winters and Tony Franciosa had done a comedy sketch about their recent marriage, and the show had involved the usual tomfoolery from Allen and his talented cast of regulars. Finally, after introducing an advertisement for Johnson Stride Wax, Allen reassured his audience: “Stay tuned for some rock and roll.” The next performer, he said, “destroys the piano and everything.”
After the messy floor in the advertisement had been miraculously cleaned and made brightly shining thanks to Stride Wax, Allen announced, “Here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’ Jerry Lee Lewis.” The drummer and bass player wore sport coats, but Lewis had on a striped short-sleeved shirt that exposed his sinewy arms. His white shoes and white belt also stood out. He immediately attacked the piano and banged out his hit song “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Careful listeners, if they could hear over the pounding piano, might have been able to discern lyrics, delivered in a lusty fashion: “Come on over baby well, we got the bull by the horn / We ain’t fakin’ / Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on.”1
The rhythm built and Lewis tossed his head back and forth, up and down. His pomaded blond hair started to flop wildly—first it came dangling down in the front, then some excited strands in the back began their own dance. He sat at a diagonal to the piano to keep better eye contact with the audience. His feet tapped with abandon. At one point in the song, he instructed a woman how to shake for him: “Easy now, shake, ah shake, you can shake one time for me.” His voice grew lower and slower, and he shook his hand for emphasis: “All you gotta do, honey, stand in one spot.” His confidence was that of a sexual veteran, a rockin’ Casanova. “Shake one time for me.” Then he glanced upward, in a state of religious or sexual ecstasy. He was greased lightning, unable to stay seated; he kicked the piano stool away, then he jumped and shaked all over. All of this from a twenty-one-year-old on national television for the first time.
Kids were delighted. The rock critic Robert Palmer, then a “pimply faced” twelve-year-old living in Little Rock, Arkansas, was dazzled, he recalled, “the first time I heard the pummeling beat, the casual sexiness, the leering invitation.” He rushed to the local grocery store, where next to the meat department stood a rack holding the latest record releases. Without any money, Palmer shoplifted the record; he felt that he could not live without it.2 Another fan remembered that “Lewis wasn’t like any of the others… . If they were wild, he was ferocious. If their music was sexy, his was promiscuous.”3 Kay Martin, a teen in Brooklyn, soon to become president of the Jerry Lee Lewis fan club, admitted that Lewis, unlike Elvis, “didn’t want to cuddle you like a teddy bear, he wanted to show you his great balls of fire; he was telling the girls there’d be a whole lot of shakin’ goin on.”4
Adults, in contrast, were disgusted. One Texas radio station manager contacted Sam Phillips, whose Sun Records label featured Lewis, to inform him that he would not play “songs by niggers.” After being told that Lewis was white, the manager maintained his disdain, telling Phillips that such lewd music was improper for his listeners.5
Jerry Lee Lewis was neither the most talented nor the most original of the singers in the early years of rock. But for a host of reasons, wrapped up in the ever present conundrum of race and sexuality, his music leered with more lust than that of most performers on the national stage. He refused, as rock historian Greil Marcus puts it, to accept limits, presenting himself as the embodiment of the southern redneck, a man who “seemed possessed” by demons both personal and social. Or, as another rock critic stated, “In a profession founded on excess, Lewis has made his name as one of the most excessive.”6
Lewis’s black contemporaries in rock and roll, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino, carried greater burdens on their backs. They had to mask their sexuality behind smiles and innuendo. As writer Norman Mailer demonstrated in an essay in Dissent magazine, even presumably enlightened northerners embraced the myth of black males as sexually charged. In the South, segregation remained stubbornly rooted, and the myth of black lust for white women was widely employed to justify suppression of black rights. The strength of this myth was demonstrated tragically in 1955. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black child from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. Till had been accused of the sin of whistling at a white woman. That woman’s husband and her brother-in-law soon made Till pay with his life. They beat him brutally, gouged out one of his eyes, and then shot him. Tying heavy weights to his limp body, the brothers tossed him in the Tallahatchie River. His body was found three days later.7
By 1957, southern racism raged at fevered pitch. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally overturned doctrine that having separate black and white facilities was constitutional. Desegregation moved at a snail’s pace. When it did occur, as in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, trouble ensued. On a daily basis, a small number of black kids trudged from a bus to all-white Central High School, facing jeering, angry white mobs. Sometimes the pain came from beatings, or white students tossing the black kids’ books to the ground. “Nigger go home” was written in lipstick on bathroom mirrors in the school.8 These years also saw a renewal of Ku Klux Klan activity and White Citizens’ Council assaults upon blacks.
Black performers walked a fine line when dealing with sexual issues, especially in front of white audiences. An uproar occurred on a television show, for example, in 1957 when an exuberant Frankie Lymon, the lead singer for the Teenagers, suddenly bounded onto the dance floor to take a turn or two with a white girl. As one show official remarked, “This could get us into trouble.” And it did.9 Traditional racial sensibilities were flouted also when blonde singer Dinah Shore gave black singer Nat King Cole a peck on the cheek after they had performed; many southern affiliates cancelled the show in angered reaction. But television was defying the constrained expectations of race and culture in the South. Growing up in the 1950s in Sardis, Mississippi, Horace Newcomb found that, for him and others, “television expanded our world and with that expansion challenged it in unexpected and doubtless, unplanned ways,” opening up new views on race, pleasure, and even the nature of rebellion. It allowed a new sensibility to peer through.10
Despite such strained racial realities, African American singers continued to perform, including songs with sexual hints. After all, rhythm and blues and rock were to a degree about unleashed sexual energy. As historian David R. Shumway points out, in the 1950s kids did have sex on their minds, perhaps more than ever before. This did not mean, however, that depictions of it could be “sexually explicit.” Quite the opposite. Violence and sexuality in comic books and television were controlled. For cultural conservatives, sexuality in rock and roll, then, had to be contained, or made nonthreatening, especially when the performer was a black male singing for a white female audience.11
No performer, with perhaps the exception of Jerry Lee Lewis, was more outrageous than Little Richard. His songs smoked with sexual innuendo and energy, and his onstage persona was highly sexualized, but to the point of nonthreatening camp. With his hair piled high and liberally pomaded, his eyeshadow, and his razor-thin mustache, Little Richard sang in a falsetto voice that trilled. His effeminacy seemed to mark him as sexually harmless to white women. But he faded quickly from the scene; by 1957, he had abandoned rock for the Church of God of the Ten Commandments.12 The calling of the spiritual world conflicted with the secular world of sin while at the same time lending that conflict a tension that rocked the shoes off audiences.
Chuck Berry understood the essentials of rock and race brilliantly. He was a highly sexualized figure, with a lean profile and good looks—and hence was a threat, especially in live performances. But he also possessed a punning sophistication. While his hit song “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” might offend racial proprieties, it did so in a veiled, jocular manner. He changed the original lyrics, written in 1956, from “brown skinned handsome man” to “brown eyed handsome man.” The song was still challenging, since the lyrics addressed well-to-do, presumably white women, telling them that they would be better served by going out with a brown eyed handsome man.13 Despite his humor and talent, Berry paid the price for his “ambiguous” lyrics, overt sexuality, and disregard for customs and laws. In 1959 he was arrested for violating the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of minors across state lines for illicit acts. The girl in question was a fourteen-year-old Native American; Berry claimed that he was under the impression that she was “of African heritage” and twenty-one years old. After a drawn-out court case, Berry was forced to spend over a year in prison.14
Growing up in Saint Louis with middle-class parents, Berry had been exposed to gospel music, rhythm and blues, and plenty of country music—he could even yodel. Indeed, Berry’s eclectic mixture sometimes confounded audiences. Appearing before a largely black crowd at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1955, Berry received a lukewarm reception. “Don’t nobody wanna hear that crap,” yelled one disgruntled listener. Much to Berry’s surprise, his reception by white audiences was more favorable.15
Berry had his finger on the pulse of teenagers. One rock historian referred to Berry as the “folk poet of the fifties” for his ability to express the “ordinary realities of the world.”16 He crossed class and racial lines to find common ground with teenagers in the mysteries of love, the boredom of high school, and the excitement of speedy cars. Even more importantly, he captured the ultimate power of rock and roll: its ability to allow one to imagine liberation from the forces of the past, from parental control, and from social etiquette.17 “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), as the title suggests, told youngsters to stop listening to the staid classical tradition and fly high with rock. Again, in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” (1957), Berry announced that all he wanted was “rock ‘n’ roll music, any old way you choose it.”
Another manner of controlling the presumed dangers black sexuality posed for young white girls was to coopt and control the music. The recording industry was, after all, big business; they cared little if the records sold were by black or white singers. One solution was to slow down the beat and heat of black rhythm and blues by having it performed by white singers.18 Pat Boone was perhaps the most successful of these crooners, singing covers but with an old sensibility. He was not a bad singer, really, especially on ballads. But he took the stuffing out of the rock songs, diminishing the beat and stilling the rhythm to make it less edgy and sexually charged. Perhaps his most outrageous appropriation was of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”—the original being a raucous veiled tribute to transvestites. Boone’s version failed to become a big hit. Billboard remarked in response that “it certainly looks as tho the public is beginning to show a decided preference for the originals—regardless of their origins.”19
Navigating sexuality was complicated but much less dangerous for white rockers. Elvis Presley did it successfully, at least early in his career. It was not for nothing that he was called “Elvis the Pelvis.” His pelvic movements were seen as so sexually provocative that one time on television the lower half of his body was hidden from view. According to Life magazine: “He uses a bump and grind routine seen only in burlesque.”20 Presley did appropriate black musical style and movements that he had observed in Memphis clubs. Sam Phillips, head of Sun Records, the Memphis studio that produced many of the early rock hits, said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars.”21 Elvis fit that bill to a tee.
Indeed, one problem early in Elvis’s career was the perception—given his song choices and singing style—that he was a black man. His controlling and capable manager, Colonel Parker, remedied that situation, and with alacrity. He let it be known, when Elvis was first achieving airplay in Memphis, that he had graduated from Humes High School, which in that age of segregation meant that he had to be white.
Nonetheless, the path to success was marked by a constant tension between images of Elvis. On the one hand, with his black leather jacket, slicked hair, and black-style vocalizing and dancing, Elvis had an air of danger, fitting well into the juvenile delinquent corner of culture. In those years, parents and educators fretted mightily about delinquency, and movie companies made a mint producing such films as Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, and Rebel without a Cause depicting teens in rebellion. Elvis tempered his rebelliousness with sterling southern manners and boyish sincerity. And he increasingly sprinkled his repertoire with sugary ballads such as “Love Me Tender” and gospel songs. Although in his second film, Jailhouse Rock, he played a young man who had served time in prison for manslaughter, the character he played emerged from jail with a mission to show himself to be a talented and good person. Military service and a series of inane films further diminished Elvis’s status as a threat to morals.
Jerry Lee Lewis “made Elvis look like a boy scout,” according to rock historian Reebee Garofalo.22
Lewis was a child of the poor (but not dirt poor) white south. The family lived in a shack, without electricity and indoor plumbing. The area around Ferriday, in northeastern Louisiana, was sodden with humidity and blessed with bass-rich lakes. Then, as now, Ferriday had an African American majority population and plenty of churches—both black and white. His father, Elmo Lewis, was a large, angular, strong man with a gargantuan appetite for hard labor who relaxed by playing guitar. His income derived from farming (corn and cotton) and from carpentry, although he also helped run a still. For the latter activity, he was once imprisoned. Lewis’s mother also labored long and hard, loved music, and was always supportive of Jerry Lee. She was devoted to the Pentecostal church. The family worked land owned by an uncle who was the richest man in town, highlighting how inequalities of wealth remained despite family connections.23
At an early age, Lewis proved himself to be a musical prodigy. He began with guitar, but after a visit to an aunt who owned a piano Lewis only wanted to boogie and slam the keys. By late 1943, thanks to building projects connected with the Second World War, Lewis’s parents were working steadily, earning enough money to buy some land. And they also managed to purchase a used piano for their son. It was a generous move and wise choice. His sister reported that Jerry could “by his early teens … stop a train with his piano playing.”24 Lewis was certainly more adept at the piano than at school—his report card was strewn with Fs, thanks to his flagging attention and attendance. Lewis did not devote himself to piano study—he had only a couple of lessons. Along with friends and cousins, he explored the sleazy side of Ferriday, or at least what seemed sleazy to the perspective of congregants of the Pentecostal church.
Will Haney’s Big House was a bar owned by an African American entrepreneur. Catering mostly to blacks, the bar offered music, drink, and gambling. Touring black rhythm and blues acts, Ray Charles, B. B. King, and others performed onstage in front of a handful of reserved tables. Victor Haney, Will’s brother, served as security, his fist encased in brass knuckles. But daring and speedy young white children, such as Jerry Lee and his cousins, might sneak in sometimes to catch a glimpse of the performers and delight in the wild music.25
This sounds like a rehash of a familiar theme, the young southern white boy weaned on the blues. To a degree it rings true, but it is also inadequate. Influences are mingled and many, especially when it comes to music, and especially in the South. There is no reason to doubt the list of performers that Lewis acknowledged as his childhood heroes. When he was around twelve years old, Lewis heard a recording of Al Jolson singing “Down among the Shimmering Pines,” and he was transfixed. He practiced that song over and over again, seeking to emote like Jolson. He adored country singers Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. He would stand outside of the Ferriday movie theater and listen to Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, perform in his many popular films. Whenever near a radio, Lewis tuned in to country music, to Barn Dance, which later became The Grand Ole Opry and another program, Louisiana Hayride.26 He sopped it all up, with glee.
Popular music in general, and rock and roll in particular, was an amalgam of various styles and genres.27 Sometimes they pushed against one another uneasily; sometimes they melded effortlessly; sometimes that combination created something original and exciting. In the process, what was “authentic” and “inauthentic” became confused.28 Chuck Berry was known disparagingly by some blues purists as a “hillbilly rocker.” African American Big Mama Thornton famously sang “Hound Dog,” which Elvis later appropriated and made into a huge hit. This seems, at first glance, a clear case of white appropriation of a black song. However, the composers of the song were Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish guys from New York City. Then, again, they wanted to be “white negroes,” effecting a black style and dating black women.29 For all of the appropriation of black songs by Boone and others, Doo Wop singers regularly recorded songs that had been composed by whites in the 1930s and 1940s. The bloodlines of rock, then, especially in its early days, were perfectly fitted to an emerging New Sensibility that rejected strict separation of style, genres, and races. Of course, within a nexus of racism and cash, the terms of the exchanges were unequal, the benefits for whites more easily turned into serious money.
Lewis’s musical sensibility grew out of his religious upbringing. Pentecostals, also known as “holy rollers,” held theatrical and spontaneous church services. Singing was raucous and sermonizing inspired, the lines between sexual and spiritual ecstasy inexact. The Holy Spirit took hold of congregants—they would suddenly leap or faint with joy. Speaking in tongues was not uncommon, another sign that the Holy Spirit was suddenly dwelling within. Illnesses, it was believed, could be cured by a laying on of hands, with the sick falling backward as they were miraculously cured. In some congregations, with absolute belief in Biblical inerrancy, congregants proved the depth of their faith and presence of the Holy Spirit by handling poisonous snakes. Sometimes, in the heat of religious rapture, congregants danced or became wooden, twitched and screamed. The Pentecostal church, in sum, was a perfect spot for Lewis to perfect his own theatrical style. It also bequeathed to him a heightened, sometimes burdensome, tension between the sins of the flesh in the secular world and the necessity of redemption in the spiritual world.30
By the age of thirteen, Lewis was a professional performer, appearing in bars and juke joints, playing and singing in a boogie-woogie style. A gig at the Blue Cat Club in Natchez, Mississippi, earned him ten bucks. He performed often at his church, singing and playing piano. Given his repertoire at the Blue Cat Club, he was not living a conventionally holy life. Wracked by guilt, perhaps pressured by his mother, and also recently married and with a child, Jerry Lee embarked for the Southwestern Bible Institute of Waxahachie in Texas, a school associated with the Assemblies of God Church. With his talent for extemporaneous speech and his mesmerizing personality, he seemed a natural for the clergy. Students at Waxahachie were expected to demonstrate “clean conduct and conversation, modest apparel in dress, high standards of moral life.”
It quickly became clear that a ministerial road was not to be traveled by Lewis. He skipped classes and escaped from the dormitory at night to hitchhike to Dallas, thirty miles away, to attend films, followed by making the rounds of nightclubs. After three months of at best desultory attendance at the school, as one story has it, Lewis was asked to perform “My God Is Real” at chapel service. Lewis obliged but played the hymn in fast-paced boogie-woogie style, doubling the tempo. Apparently, most in the audience began to feel the spirit—holy or otherwise. The authorities, however, failed to detect God’s presence, and Lewis was expelled from the school. As he put it, “You can’t get the Bible from all these silly books y’all got here.”31
The rest of Lewis’s story resembles the scenario captured in Chuck Berry’s classic “Johnny B. Goode”—although the instrument of choice in this case was the piano rather than guitar. The song depicted a poor kid from the country who, thanks to talent and determination, became a rock star. After his failure at Bible school and the drudgery of various unskilled jobs, Lewis headed in 1956 to Memphis to court Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. With immense brashness, not to mention talent, Lewis believed that he could be the next Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, or Carl Perkins. All he needed was a chance.
The folks at Sun Records were dazzled by Lewis’s confidence and talent. In short order, they released his first recording, “Crazy Arms,” which earlier that year had been recorded by Ray Price. It was a hit, and Lewis soon purchased a “red Cadillac convertible with white leather interior.”32 The song’s themes were typical of country music: a lover who has been jilted but now longs for the woman because she “holds somebody new.” Hints of Lewis’s signature style were apparent. He opened with some fancy piano work, sliding his fingers across the keys a couple of times, and he took a long break in the middle of the song to play boogie-woogie style, before returning to country crooning. He repeated phrases for emphasis: “Not mine, not mine, not mine.” It was Lewis’s first hit, albeit on a small scale compared to what soon followed.33
With the huge popularity of his second recording, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the challenge was to find another song for Lewis to record. Sun Records let it be known that they were looking for material. Otis Blackwell, a prolific African American songwriter, born in Brooklyn, wrote songs infused with country and rhythm and blues styles. He had already scored hits with “Fever” (recorded first by Little Willie John for the R & B market, then by Peggy Lee for a huge national audience) and Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel.”
“Great Balls of Fire,” composed by Blackwell and sung by Lewis, came out as a record less than a month after the United States had been rattled by the Soviet Union’s successful launch of a satellite into outer space. As the New York Times remarked, Sputnik “represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere.”34 Sputnik’s transmitters sent radio signals back to earth. While many youth were fascinated with Sputnik, they were beginning to exult in other possibilities for radio waves. Technology had developed transistor radios in 1954, although the initial models were expensive and bulky. But by December 1957, when “Great Balls of Fire” was a huge hit, teens could purchase a portable transistor radio for about $39.95, with prices dropping rapidly in 1958 thanks to imports from Japan. In a metaphorical sense, young people for the last couple of years had been going “out of this world” with the new beat of rock and roll. The task for Lewis’s new song was to launch them for about two minutes, rather than the ninety-six required by Sputnik to orbit around the earth.
“Great Balls of Fire” reproduced much of the sound and sense of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The song was recorded at Sun Studio, probably in late August—and the first take was a keeper. “Great Balls of Fire,” as Sam Phillips anticipated, got attention, given its sexually suggestive title and typical rhythmic explosions. It quickly became a hit single in November 1957. Concurrently, Lewis and his bandmates were filmed performing the new song in a studio, as part of an emerging genre, the rock and roll film. Jamboree, which hit national screens in December, was based on the flimsiest of conceits, but few viewers were there for the storyline. They wanted to see their rock heroes in action: Fats Domino, Buddy Knox, and Lewis (along with an odd medley of other acts, including for some reason the Count Basie Orchestra, featuring Joe Williams).
By this time, Lewis’s ego had ballooned, although in this case it was tempered with critical acumen. Myra Lewis, his most recent bride, wanted to watch her husband’s performance in the film at a private screening. Lewis refused to allow her to enter the theater until his one-minute-and-forty-second appearance on screen. “There ain’t nothin’ to it but my song, anyhow.”35
Lewis’s wild, leering performances while on tour brought home the sexual content to even the dullest of libidos. While working on the arrangement for “Great Balls” at Sun Studio, and after some serious drinking, Lewis and Sam Phillips “got into the damnedest religious argument.”36 Lewis referred to the song as the devil’s music, which would lead straight to “H-E-L-L,” as Lewis spelled out the word for emphasis or for fear of cursing. His vehemence was met with counterarguments. Sam Phillips saw no reason why a rock singer could not still do God’s work in the secular world, perhaps even saving souls. “No! No! No! No!” shouted Lewis. “How can the Devil save souls? … Man, I got the Devil in me!” They argued until in the early hours of the morning. Finally, tired of the debate, Lewis, as he usually did, succumbed to the sinful side of his nature and recorded the song.37
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane
You broke my will
But what a thrill
Goodness gracious great balls of fire.
So opened the song. Later, he sings, “Oooh, feels gooood… . I wants to love you like a lover should.” It was a healthy dose of sin on vinyl. Lewis was enthralled, almost to the point of being out of control in love with this woman. With exuberance, he sings:
You’re fine, so kind
Got to tell this world that you’re mine mine mine mine.
Lewis was wild on the piano. He banged the keys and made the glissando central to his playing. His hair flopped with the music. He often paused between songs to neaten it, slowly extracting a comb from his pocket. The piano stool or chair was always kicked aside in the heat of passion, and he would also briefly play the piano with his feet. Sometimes he jumped atop the piano. This was showmanship, to be sure, but it evoked the Holy Spirit expressing itself in the salvation of rock and roll music. It was thrilling, edgy, even dangerous.
Although many parts of the story may be apocryphal, some maintain that at one performance Lewis set a piano on fire. At the Paramount Theater in New York City in March 1958, as part of a show organized by rock DJ Alan Freed, a dispute arose over which act would close the bill. There were plenty of high-quality performers: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly, and Frankie Lymon. Lewis wanted to do it, but the honor fell to Berry. Lewis was relegated to the penultimate act. Always cocky, Lewis was pissed off. There seems agreement about the following. Lewis was singing, appropriately, “Great Balls of Fire,” when he somehow managed to drip some lighter fluid onto the piano and set it on fire. With each telling of the story, of course, the fire has grown bigger. Lewis continued playing a bit while the fire burned. He strutted off the stage as the crowd went ballistic with excitement, and he passed Berry. According to Nick Tosches’s account in his biography of Lewis, Lewis accosted Berry with the words: “Follow that, nigger.” Lewis, who liked to embellish tales or lie outright, later said: “Burned that damn piana to the ground… . They forced me to do it, tellin’ me I had to go on before Chuck.”38 Another account strikes a different note. Lewis had many bad traits, but he respected Berry’s talent and that of other African American musicians. He was competitive. Once told that he would perform before Johnny Cash at a concert, Lewis went all out and, as he left the crowd swooning, said to Cash side-stage, “ ‘Nobody follows the Killer.’ ” According to Rick Bragg, another Lewis biographer, in similar fashion that night, Lewis snarled at Berry, “I want to see you follow that, Chuck.”39
Such shenanigans, real and imagined, have become part of rock folklore and inflamed parents, educators, and religious leaders around the country, especially in the Bible Belt southern states. Many cringed at the racial miscegenation at the heart of rock and roll, its affront to sexual propriety, its “primitivism,” and its connection to an imagined spate of juvenile delinquency. Newspapers covered in sensational detail when fights and riots broke out at rock concerts.40 In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1956, even such a smooth singer as Nat King Cole, who routinely played before segregated audiences in the South, was assaulted onstage by members of the White Citizens’ Council screaming “Let’s go get that coon.” They hit Cole and threw him to the ground.41 Record-burning rallies were organized by fundamentalist churches to save the souls of youngsters from the evils of rock music. Voices condemning rock were common in the North as well. John Carroll, a priest in Boston, stated: “Rock and roll inflames and excites youth like jungle tom-toms.” In the Midwest, the “Crusade for Decent Disks” focused attention on the obscenity of rhythm and blues recordings. While much of the antagonism to rock was racially oriented, African Americans also found some songs too heated for their tastes. In 1954, the black group Hank Ballard and the Midnighters wanted to record a tune, “Sock It to Me, Annie” aimed at their usual black audience. But the title seemed too lascivious, so it was changed to “Work with Me Annie.” Although it became a bona fide rhythm and blues hit, many black radio stations refused to air it.42
Tooting his own horn, Lewis claimed that many parents thought “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was the “most risqué record that they had ever heard.” Look magazine reported that he made “parents mourn for the comparative quiet of Presley.”43 Acts like Lewis threatened the stability of the white race. According to the Alabama White Citizens’ Council, “The obscenity and vulgarity of the rock-and-roll music is obviously a means by which the white man and his children can be driven down to the level of the nigger.”44
In the end, it was not the fanaticism of the cultural custodians, racists, or any musical letdown that caused Lewis to fade from public attention. He handed opponents of rock a challenge to propriety that even he could not weather.
In December 1957, Lewis went with a friend, Glenda Burgess, a large woman, twenty-two years of age, to obtain a marriage license. Burgess, however, was not his betrothed. Instead, he planned to marry a remote cousin, Myra Gale Brown, who was thirteen years of age. She was also the daughter of the band’s bass player. Burgess filled out the form as if she were Brown. Armed with the marriage license, Lewis and Myra then drove down to a “real dive” in Mississippi, where Reverend M. C. Whitten married them under a banner reading “Where your sacred hour of today becomes tender memories of tomorrow.”45
The marriage got off to a bumpy start. Learning about it, Myra’s dad went for his pistol but then decided to talk to the district attorney. He calmed down, perhaps because a rift with Lewis would send him back to his old dangerous job working on electrical wiring high above the ground. Further complicating the marriage was its illegality—Lewis’s divorce from his previous wife, Jane Mitchum, with whom he had a child, was not yet official. He had thus both married a minor and committed bigamy.46
In May 1958, while touring in Great Britain (and being paid the then immense sum of $100,000), the marriage made headlines. Not only was Myra thirteen, but she looked tiny, even when wearing pumps and fashionable clothing and with her hair done up. Great balls of editorial fire and indignation swirled. Lewis had come to represent all of the lasciviousness that critics associated with rock and roll. The uproar in England traveled quickly to the States. Radio stations refused to play the music of a moral degenerate. He had just finished making an appearance in another rock film, High School Confidential, with his song from the film poised for success. According to Lewis, the record “was pulled off the charts and off the radio in one day.”47 And Dick Clark would not book him anymore on American Bandstand.48
Lewis seemed surprised by the hubbub. In part, he was always protected by his armor of self-confidence. It was common in Lewis’s home region for young men to take very young brides. As he later explained, “I was a twenty-one-year old kid, and I didn’t know whether I was comin’ or goin’.” And, as he sometimes added, he loved Myra.49
He even printed a long letter in Billboard magazine, in June 1958, addressed to his fans. He confessed that his “life has been stormy.” But he also felt he had done nothing knowingly illegal or immoral. He called press coverage of his marriage a case of “sensationalism … a scandal started to sell papers.” Lewis continued, “I hope that if I am washed up as an entertainer it won’t be because of this bad publicity.”50 By 1959, now with Myra and a newborn child, Lewis admitted that “he was about broke.”51
He was also caught up in a host of calamities that plagued rock music. In February 1959, in stormy weather, a plane carrying rockers Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens crashed, killing all aboard. Although overstated, it was a day when, as Don McLean later sang, “the music died.” By 1960, the record industry was pummeled by bad publicity and from congressional investigations about a payola scandal. Disk jockeys had regularly accepted—indeed expected—cash from record companies in return for playing songs and making them hits. Many of the nation’s leading disk jockeys came under scrutiny. Attention focused on Alan Freed, who was fired from his station and quickly faded from view a broken figure; Dick Clark, who denied everything—despite evidence to the contrary—survived the scandal.
The edge of rock became dulled. Instead of the energy of Lewis and other early rockers, the commercial apparatus of rock—record companies and advertisers—began pumping up “clean” acts, with less attention paid to talent than looks. Handsome, with a swirl of hair rigged to stay on his forehead, Fabian became a heartthrob for young girls with his hit “Tiger.” He growled mildly, but he failed to rock. Other good-looking young men joined him in the limelight. Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, Tommy Sands, and James Darren had hit recordings that are best forgotten. Rock had entered its brief dark period. It would last only a few years: a sensibility premised on energy, pleasure, sex, and transgression could not be kept long under wraps.